Istwa Nou

American military officers told investigators that the corvée existed in order to build roads and that the roads had not been laid out for military purposes, while conceding that they carried great military value. The reports those same officers filed as the work went on discuss the whereabouts of insurgents, the mood of each community, and where sympathisers with the occupation might be recruited. Road building and surveillance were one operation. Every cleared path and rebuilt bridge extended the reach of the occupation into districts that had governed their own movement until then, and the people most exposed were the women who used those roads every day. Grace Sanders Johnson reads the official denial as part of the method. The occupation described its engineering as commerce and improvement while its paperwork recorded who lived where, who was armed and who could be turned. The roads carried goods. They also carried soldiers, informants and files.

Poor women, peasants and working women in the towns took the worst of the road building and the injuries that came with it. Surveillance reached everyone. Ghislaine Charlier remembered an atmosphere of watching that ran through every layer of Haitian social life while she was growing up. Robert Cabeche, the man who had refused to sign the protectorate alongside her grandfather Auguste Garoute, appears in American records of rebel activity, filed under his name as one of a family known to be contrary to the occupation and its gendarmerie. Households close to the Garoutes were followed in the street. Wives and children drew particular attention as likely carriers of antioccupation newspapers and pamphlets, because the occupation understood that opposition travelled through families and through women's networks as reliably as through armed bands. The Americans watched what Haitians read and repeated because in the first ten years their reputation for brutality was spreading. They went on denying the brutality while they watched for news of it.

Under the American occupation the market women of Haiti went back to the roads and the market squares, and by going they refused the control the occupation claimed over their labour, their movement and their choices. Their claim on the nation ran through their knowledge of its ground and its prices, and that knowledge could not be requisitioned. Their traffic unsettled every layer of occupation bureaucracy and upset the arrangements Haitian officials and American officers were trying to hold together. The historian Yveline Alexis has shown women meeting interrogation with silence and pretended ignorance while officers threatened to kill them. The answer was more paperwork and more watching, with radio and aircraft turned on ordinary conversation between Haitians. The occupation had been built on the assumption that Haitian compliance came free. Women priced it. The drag they created slowed the machine as effectively as the caco columns in the hills, and it fed the campaigns at home and abroad that eventually made nineteen years of occupation impossible to continue.